The Year After
by EugenieVictoria
Summary: Chronicles the year following Melanie's death, told through the eyes of Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett respectively as they each overcome their own personal losses and find strength in one another.
1. Light of Life

_**Note: This story recounts the events of the year following Melanie's death, told through the eyes of Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett respectively. Any and all feedback is solicited. All characters are the intellectual property of Margaret Mitchell.**_

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><p>1. Ashley<p>

_Life changes so very quickly. _

_An instant, a flash, a breath. _

_So little separates death from life._

And yet, the consequences are such that life as you know it ends. Not for the one who died, no, it is a matter of supreme inconsequence for them. But for those who are left behind, there is the cold realization that there is no way to recover the lost save for looking backward. Perpetually backward, reveling in the memory of the good times and cringing at the memory of the bad ones. But even so, there is no way to fill that void. There is no way to make up for lost time. What's done is done.

Life, so short, so fleeting, is irrecoverable once lost.

And then, after all that settles in, you sit down, a glass of brandy in front of you, and you look at yourself in the mirror. You see a face before you that you don't recognize, and you are left with that most repugnant of emotions, self-pity.

I had made no major life changes since the day that it happened. I put away the pen and paper which I had used to record the words on September 27, 1873, a day or two or three after it had happened. For a long, long while, I wrote nothing else. I thought of nothing else.

I recall her funeral, the words spoken at her graveside. _In the midst of life, we are in death_. I realize then that I must have parroted the same words to everyone who came over to the house in those first several weeks after she had passed. There were cousins from Macon who descended like flies and brought food and made drinks and gave Pitty smelling salts when she fainted during the eulogy. There was India who worked her fingers to the bone serving the food and then picking up the plates and washing them for the next morning's use. And then of course, there were our friends (always _our_ never _my_) who filled our otherwise quiet house, even after I had withdrawn into my study.

Our bedroom had been cleaned out and used for company, although Aunt Caroline had thought it a bit morbid to sleep in the bed in which Melly had lay dying. It would never be my bedroom. It was hers, in every way. The linens and curtains so meticulously starched, the white porcelain pitcher by the bedside, the little miniatures of her father and mother and Charles, looking down on us with their benevolent brown eyes. In the closet still hung her two day dresses, her pale green Sunday best, and the lovely blue silk she had worn to my last birthday party. Her faded bathrobe lay on the divan, the novel she was reading still bookmarked to page two hundred and forty-two.

It was those sorts of details which kept me sane. There were other details that I could not think of without losing my bearings completely. The blood on the bedroom floor for instance. Melly's lifeblood. The blood that stayed on the floor until Scarlett cleaned it up herself.

Scarlett. The last link to my boyhood. She was resting at a spa in Marietta when Rhett sent for her, telling her that Melly had died. She was recovering from the deaths of two children, one unborn, the other the light of her life. She wanted to go to Tara the day after Melly's funeral, but never went. I remember hearing her cry as she scrubbed the floor, attacking it with the scrub brush until no trace of red remained. I heard her talking to Melly, saying something that I couldn't understand. Clearly I couldn't help her. Anything I said would fail to convey my understanding of her grief. I knew she loved Melly, perhaps even more than she loved me. I encountered the same failure earlier, the moment she walked in the house and offered to let Beau stay at Tara with Ella and Wade Hampton. I tried to recount my story, my false words of politeness, but Scarlett just squeezed my arm and walked past me and into the bedroom. Seeing the blood, she immediately understood, rolled up her sleeves and worked in silence.

In the moments after it happened, I cannot recall anything that was said to me, nor can I recall saying anything to anyone around me. Vaguely I recall Scarlett, constant and steadfast, holding my hand like a child. In the days that followed, I was overcome with the exhaustion of the three day vigil and the following days of mourning leading up to her burial. I must have asked for Scarlett, because she was sitting in my bedroom the day after the funeral. She was telling me that Rhett had left her, although I have no memory of the details. Perhaps there weren't any, just that he had left her and that was that. I must have said something though; she was sobbing on my shoulder, and thereafter assumed that I knew the entire story, so I played along as though I did.

It is almost a year later, and much has happened. We have all changed, for better and for worse. It would be tedious to draw up in narrative fashion what all has occurred, for it's hardly been a linear journey. How simple it would be if we could just collapse the sequence of time, to be able to revisit the frames of our memories, enabling us to select those to metaphorically hang on the wall. Alas, time is not measured in photographs, in forced smiles which we can look at and pass down for posterity. No, life has to be lived. Melly knew that, that which the rest of us had no concept.

Thus begins the account of my year after her death, my year of rediscovering the art of living.


	2. Time

_**Note: This story recounts the events of the year following Melanie's death, told through the eyes of Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett respectively. Any and all feedback is solicited. All characters are the intellectual property of Margaret Mitchell.**_

2. Scarlett

_I'll be in town on business tomorrow. I haven't forgotten our bargain. Rhett._

October 30, 1873, a Wednesday. I had received a telegram from Rhett.

I had come home from the store, then walked over to Ashley's to make sure that he was alright. The two of us sat in Ashley's small living room staring at each other. I asked Dilcey to start dinner and asked him if he wanted a drink. I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room; he was reading in the chair by the fire. He always sat there, reading by the fire.

I think the book was called _Great Expectations_. A strange title for a novel, isn't it? What's so great about expectations, anyway? You expect that things will turn out a certain way, after all. And when they don't, where does that leave you? Do you break? Do you go on expecting something else, only to have that hope shattered as well?

I recall some old adage about not squandering time, for that is the stuff that life is made of. I'm guilty of that very thing. Squandering time. It's so easy to squander something that cannot be measured, is it not? But I must do better in the future.

I set the table in the dining room so that we could eat and still feel the warmth of the fireplace. For such a little house, it got surprisingly cold; no wonder Melly was worried about Ashley catching a chill. Aside from that, the fire was a nice reminder of both of our childhoods. The roaring blazes at Twelve Oaks and Tara were welcome memories. Mother would light all of the candles and Pa, dear Pa, he would get to drinking and relay in his booming voice a tale of Irish valor on the battlefield.

I lit the candles this night, forming a circle of flame around us. We sat down and I poured him another drink. My attention was on the fireplace.

Ashley was talking, then he wasn't.

At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking, he asked me if I thought that Melly knew about us. I said no, I've already told you this, Ashley. We were blessed. She had no idea.

"Good," he had said. "I don't know why, but I still think she knew." The next minute passed and he began to ramble about the book in front of him, about how much of a gentleman Mr. Dickens was.

I have no idea what he was saying at the instant he stopped talking again, holding his face in his hands.

"I remember looking up," he said. "She was slumped down in the bed. Motionless. At first, I thought she was making a joke, an attempt to mock the difficulty of my day, to remind me how much she…"

I remember saying, "Don't do this, Ashley."

"When she didn't respond," he went on, "I remember lifting her from the bed. I remember the feel of her body against me as she fell forward, first on the bed and then on the floor. Then I saw it. She was bleeding all over the floor."

I watched his face as he relived it. I remembered that blood. I had spent the day after the funeral scrubbing it off the floor. After I had done it, I realized that I had just erased all tangible trace of Melly from the room. Of course, her things were still there, just as she had left them. But they could have been anyone's things. That they were hers was only so because I knew that she arranged things a certain way.

I remember that telegram from Rhett. _Mrs. Wilkes dying, come home immediately._ The distance between Marietta and Atlanta is about an hour by train. I have no memory of that train ride. I could not remember the features of the person sitting next to me if my life depended on it. When I arrived at the depot, I was hurried into the carriage by Rhett. They were waiting at Melly and Ashley's. Doctor Meade and Aunt Pitty and Uncle Henry and all the rest of them.

Everyone else was wearing black, except for me and Rhett. Doctor Meade turned to me, "She wants to see you, Scarlett," he said. I suppose that was the moment that I knew.

After I said goodbye to her for the last time, I ran home. Something about enduring great loss somehow entitles one to reevaluate the state of one's life. I realized how important Rhett was to me, how I desperately wanted him to love me again. And I, in my arrogant expectation of his devotion winning out, was left to rot in our big empty house.

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with Melly. Because there really was nothing I did not discuss with Melly.

I could ask her questions about anything, and she always had the right answer. Since we were sixteen and seventeen, our days had been filled with the sound of one another's voices.

I did not always think she was the universal authority, no, I admit freely that I often thought her a sentimental little fool. But we were each the person the other trusted.

What I remember most about the night that Melly died and Rhett left was its silence. But perhaps the greatest mystery was the fact that at that moment, I would have been happy to never lay eyes on Rhett again if I could see Melly just one more time.

When I saw her the next morning laid out in her parlor, I noticed a cut on her lip and a faint bruise on her face. Ashley had said something about her falling. I shut down all responses within my body, save my command to India to remove Beau from the house immediately. My children did not see Bonnie laying out in the parlor, and I'd be damned if Beau's last memory of his mother was her pale, bruised, lifeless body laid out in her own parlor.

There is no set measure for grief, I've found. I've been widowed twice, and felt nothing even remotely close to mourning. I felt sad, lonely, an abandoned child. But this had no distance. Melly was still there. I just couldn't see her. Weakly, blindly, flailing in the dark, I sought her and couldn't see her. When Pa and Mother died, I felt lost, but I kept going. Always, always, I kept going. When I think back on it, I wonder if I went on because of Melly. I've always thought of myself as particularly resilient and strong, but Melly was what drove me to be so.

I remember Doctor Meade coming over to my house and his wife offering to stay the night with me. Someone must have seen Rhett's carriage leaving and presumably the whole town knew that he was gone for the time being.

I have little memory of my conversation with the Meades, but I reassured them that I would be fine. And I was, until the night. I was alone in bed with that sinking feeling in my stomach. Had Rhett meant it when he said that he didn't care that I loved him? Love doesn't just stop, does it? You can't be in love with someone and then not be, can you?

That treacherous little whisper inside my head whispers, _you can be and then cease to be-one breath-that's all that separates life and death-what's so special about love, Scarlett O'Hara?_

The night after the funeral was another sleepless one, and the night after that, and after that. But having the children made it a little more tolerable. Listening to them play through their sadness made my own problems seem a little less important. And I would go through an entire day without thinking of Rhett or Melly.

But then I would go to sleep, and then I'd wake up and remember. That first night was the last night I spent alone, of course. Wade and Ella were with me, Beau too, for a time. And Mammy even returned from Tara. I needed that first night alone. I needed to feel absolutely alone and helpless, utterly humble. Only then would he ever come back to me.

Thus begins my account of the year after her death, my year of shattered expectations, and learning to find joy in the most unexpected places.


	3. Under the Stars

_**Note: This story recounts the events of the year following Melanie's death, told through the eyes of Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett respectively. Any and all feedback is solicited. All characters are the intellectual property of Margaret Mitchell.**_

3. Rhett

I've always considered myself to be an intelligent man, priding myself on both my reasoning skills and cognitive clarity; however, the indisputable fact remains that one's mind, no matter how supple, is quite easily deranged when it is dealt grief. Why is that so? Well, I'm no scientist, but I would have to imagine that it occurs when the relationship that one has come to depend on is no longer there. It's a terrific paradox, isn't it? To be, and yet not to be?

I remember Miss Melly telling me that I was ill after Bonnie died. Was I? Sick with grief, sick with sorrow? Sure. But then she said something about overcoming it. How does one overcome the death of one's child?

It was nearly a month after Miss Melly herself had been laid to her eternal rest, nearly a month after the fateful evening I had left Scarlett standing in the foyer. I recognized, with the help of Belle, that there had been occasions over that past month on which I was incapable of thinking rationally.

I was thinking like Bonnie would think, that my thoughts and wishes (and tantrums) would reverse the narrative, or otherwise change the unpleasant outcome. This disordered thinking was so erratic that I could hardly make sense of it all. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel thinking that I had forgotten about Bonnie, forgotten to say goodnight or worse, left her somewhere. Then I would walk outside and look up at the stars in the night sky, imagining that Bonnie was standing next to me, demanding that the biggest and brightest star in the heavens be named Bonnie. I would assure her that it was so, then she would wrap both her little hands around one of mine and kiss it, and in her firm little voice say- "Never leave me, Daddy."

But I had left her, hadn't I?

I had allowed her to be buried alive by allowing other people to think that she was dead.

There had come a point in the first week after I had walked out on Scarlett but before the funeral when it occurred to me that I didn't have anything of Bonnie's to remember her by. I had a miniature of her, yes, which I kept in the breast pocket of my coat at all times, but nothing that she touched. None of her clothes, her toys. None of the little things she had screamed so loudly for then quickly discarded when something better caught her eye. Many people had complemented my devotion to the child, as though the loving of one's only offspring was worthy of a medal. But their praise turned into pity in the days after her death, and with typical well-meaning yet misguided pity, they would attempt to "help" by bringing her up at any possible instance.

Wasn't it charming when little Bonnie Blue did this … or I remember when Bonnie Blue said that … Its part of our ritual of death, it seems, especially here in the South. Its our duty to keep the spirit of the departed alive by bringing them up as much as possible. But what about those closest to them? I don't want to talk _about_ my daughter, I want to talk _to_ her. I don't want to imagine what she would have been like as an adult, I want my little girl back.

And then there is Scarlett. I can't even look at the woman for a minute without thinking about the child we lost. I wanted desperately to talk about Bonnie to Scarlett, but how could I? For instance, we walked every morning. Or that I knew every single little dress and habit and nightie in Bonnie's closet by heart. They were as familiar to me as my own.

But Scarlett would have never gone into that room. Anything to avoid actually touching the children. Appraising them with the same cool detachment she might the convicts at the mill, caring very little for their wellbeing as long as favorable results were being produced with very little effort on her part. And look at them, Wade Hampton, scared of his own shadow. Ella, pitifully slowwitted and dull-eyed. Bonnie, dead. The baby that she never wanted, dead at its father's hands for an ill-placed jibe.

I had to get out of that house. If I only had the strength to do so.

I went to my closet and pulled out my suitcase and set it on the bed. I set aside certain things, a hat that Bonnie had adorned with turkey feathers, the overcoat I had been wearing when Scarlett had the horrible fall down the stairs, but I stuffed most of the contents of my closet into two bags and called for Pork to ready the carriage. I was not ready to pack any of the winter jackets and the shoes, but it was a start.

I stopped at the door to the room.

I had left a closet full of shoes. Shoes and overcoats. I realized after a minute or two why I left them. I would need a reason to return. As though Wade and Ella weren't enough of a reason, my shoes and overcoats were. The recognition of this thought by no means made it an acceptable one in my eyes. But it is a true statement, though I wish more than anything that I could love them more.

On further reflection, I saw leaving as the first example of this sort of thinking, honesty with myself. It's me saying, you win, Scarlett. Have Ashley, have my money. Knock yourself out.

Whatever else had been on my mind when I so determinately told Scarlett that I didn't give a damn what she did, there was also the level of madness on which I reasoned Miss Melly would forgive me for, were she alive. If Miss Melly had lived, she would have said that the marriage could have been salvaged, that we could have adjusted to life without Bonnie, we could have tried for another baby. In any case, we might have been able to "fix" things.

As it was, I fled to Charleston. No sooner had I arrived, I left for New Orleans. No sooner had I arrived at New Orleans, I left for Atlanta. I needed to go back to Atlanta. It made sense, of course. I've never been one to run, to flee from danger. But as much as I'd like to call my need to return an act of bravery, in truth, it stemmed from the fact that it was Atlanta that held all of my memories of both Miss Melly and Bonnie. Even if they were both on a very extended vacation, the city was home to them, and they would eventually return to it. I had to be there when they did.

I realize now that I was gone a grand total of three weeks. I recall an outpouring of sympathy upon my return. It occurred to me that some point was being avoided in conversation.

It had to be about Scarlett and Ashley. The unsaid names.

Many things went through my mind, although my first instinct was to cry out "no!" No, she wouldn't do that. Not even Scarlett could be that callous.

I would change the subject, and Mrs. Meade or Mrs. Meriweather would make their excuses and carry on with their business. Only after I removed myself from their company did it occur to me that it was very reasonable for her to be over at Ashley's. It was something that moved her. Perhaps she could offer something to move him.

I needed to try. Miss Melly would want me to try.

So I sent her a wire from the Western Union.

_I'll be in town on business tomorrow. I haven't forgotten our bargain. Rhett._


	4. A Knife In the Dark

4. Ashley

On the surface, I am sure that I appeared fairly rational. To the average observer, I am sure that the busybodies of our town were praising me for my fortitude. How good it is, they would undoubtedly say, that Ashley is being so very strong for that darling little boy.

The priest at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception intercepted me as I was returning home from the lumber yard and asked if I minded a Mass in Melly's memory. But Melly wasn't Catholic, was my first response. Automatic and mechanical.

The priest smiled at me sympathetically, yes, but Mrs. Wilkes was so generous with our widows and orphans. Why, the day before she fell ill, she was distributing soup on our church steps. . .

_Damn the priest!_ I cursed inwardly. I don't want to hear it! I don't want to hear that she was working her fingers to the bone while she should have been bedridden. Maybe then, maybe then…she would still be here.

I paused as the kindly eyes of the priest fixed on me, awaiting my answer. Melly would have had it no other way.

"Of course," I reply slowly. "Say the Mass."

He invited me to come on Friday. I did so, grudgingly, and sat in the back of the packed church while the Catholic priest said the Mass and the Episcopal priest delivered the sermon.

The organ played the haunting chords of _Panis Angelicus_. Bread of heaven, even for the poor, humblest servants. I would hear it from then on, even in my dreams. Like a knife in the dark, cutting into my heart. Knowing that bringing her back was impossible…that she was truly gone.

Life without Melly was not what I had expected it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died, for instance: my father died an old man, a few days short of his seventy-first birthday, my mother was much younger, around thirty, but both were after some years of increasingly bad health. I understood the inevitability of their deaths, that they were old, or in Mother's case, chronically ill. I had been expecting it all my life, reared for it even; for when Father died, I would inherit Twelve Oaks and eventually, I too would die and pass it on to my own son. But Melly's death was not inevitable. For one so frail, she was hardly ever sick. She nursed me through more bad colds the winter before than she herself suffered from her entire life. Doctor Meade had assured her that she would have no permanent ill-effects from Beau's difficult birth-if she had no more children.

It was my fault that she was dead. It _is _my fault that Beau does not have his mother.

Here-and then gone.

I must confess a lingering darkness as I reflected upon her death in those weeks that followed her funeral. Scarlett, God love her, hounded me ruthlessly, forcing soup down my throat when I felt likely to never eat again. But what took me completely for surprise was the arrival of a handwritten note the week of Halloween. I remember the date simply because the letter preceded his visit by a few days.

But in it, the man I had fairly despised precisely intuited how I felt. The death of one's beloved, he wrote, "dislodges things deep within us, sets off reactions that may shock us and no doubt bring upon a resounding surge of memories and feelings of despair, shame, and guilt for past behaviors. Honestly, Ashley-I hope you are not offended by my informality-I myself am feeling buffeted by the memories of your wife. Her gentle goodness in the midst of a very dark world-like a beacon of hope for a floundering vessel upon choppy waters. I am sure that many of your friends have given you a set period of mourning; and yet, I am quite sure that you will always mourn her, as I will. Understand that I have no ill will toward you; I hope very much that any animosity between us has gone to ground long ago."

And that was that. Melly was gone to ground as Rhett had so elegantly put it. I would mourn, of course, for an indeterminate amount of time, but I would still get up in the morning. I would still put on my suit and go to that lumber yard and pretend that I understood what it was I was supposed to be doing there.

I would see to it that Beau studied hard in his lessons, that he would go to Europe and college, just as Charles and I did.

I would remember that Scarlett was enduring the same loss I was, only tenfold.

And finally, I would do everything in my power to see to it that she and Rhett were reunited. That and only that would be the atonement for my unfaithfulness.

I saw Scarlett the morning of his arrival. She had made herself ill in her preparation for the visit, so the woman I beheld in the study of the Peachtree mansion was bare-legged, in slippers, teeth chattering as she sipped a cup of tea that she had allowed to go cold.

Some memory of my mother warned me against embracing her in her state of undress-but the overpowering memory of Melly encouraged me to do just that. It was, after all, what Melly would have done.

Its going to be alright, I say.

There would have been a time that I would have been ridden with an insatiable appetite for her body, but felt no such ardor as I stroked her silky hair. Perhaps no part of my body was working as it should, but I'd like to attribute it to a growing sense of responsibility I felt for the current state of her marriage. I kissed her forehead, then sent her upstairs to bed, promising to remain in case Rhett arrived. In truth, I anticipated him arriving on the evening train, and I was making ready to leave for work as soon as Mammy reappeared and told me that Scarlett was resting comfortably and that I could go.

A knock at the door roused me from my study of some art on the wall. A strange impressionist piece, the artist of which I was unfamiliar…

I hurried to the door before they could knock again and force Mammy to make the trip down the staircase. I put a smile on my face, lest the visitor think that I, as a husband in mourning, was being morbidly self-indulgent; conveniently, I forgot completely how it would look that the selfsame mourning husband was greeting callers at the home of a female friend, but I digress…

Rhett was no less stunned than I, I imagine, if not more. I wanted to slam the door in his face, but I must have been somewhat competent enough to invite the man into his own house.

"I appear to have forgotten my key," he said.

I said nothing, preferring to leave the talking to him.

"She's upstairs," I said, feeling completely out of place.

"I gathered," he replied, looking down at his shoes.

"She's missed you," I tried again.

"You don't say," he said.

"I should leave," I reached out for my hat.

"I shouldn't have come," he grabbed my arm. "Please, don't leave on my account."

"Rhett, I am here only as a friend," I said softly, feeling the need to make that fact clear to him. "On my life, I swear it is so."

"Always," he said, his voice strange and haunting. "I'll be at the bank. If you would be so kind, leave word for her that I will call around supper to see the children."

He left with little ceremony, bowing slightly and shutting the door softly behind him. I then hurried upstairs to Scarlett, informing her that under no circumstances would I ever forgive her if she feigned illness this night. It was her one chance to redeem his love-and my one chance to redeem myself.

I left the house hastily and told Hugh Elsing in passing not to expect me at work…I needed to have a long overdue conversation with Rhett Butler, man to man, and not within earshot of Scarlett.


	5. Be Prepared

5. Scarlett

I remember very little about that first supper with Rhett after he had left me standing at the door a second time. At the end of it, he kissed me goodnight, then walked upstairs to say goodbye to the children. Then, he left Wade and Ella standing like statues at their nursery door, bewildered that he was leaving them so shortly after arriving.

"You're looking pale, Scarlett," he said, then turned around slowly toward the door, then back again. "You know, you have a duty to enjoy yourself."

And then he left, as quickly as he had come.

In the first few weeks of November, I ate nothing besides ham and biscuits. Isn't that silly? Such childish fare. But the thought of brandy and the accompanying evening meal made me nauseous, so Ella, Wade and I had our ham and biscuits. Ham and biscuits I could eat. It was all I could eat.

But in public, my performance was impeccable, as well as any stage player. I did not wail or keen or in any way direct the attention of the Old Guard away from Ashley. I wore mourning black for Melly, but not a weeping veil - India couldn't say that I was behaving out of place. I sat dutifully in the back row of Immaculate Conception, made my introductions to the priest who had been Melly's friend, and made the necessary preparations for Ella's First Communion in the spring.

And I worried about Ashley, who in turn worried about me. Rhett will come back, he said.

_Rhett will come back_.

Rhett will come back, like a litany.

In the end, he was right.

But not in the way I might have desired.

December 20, 1873.

I walked into the hospital on Courtland and Baker and held his swollen hand.

_I'm sorry, Scarlett, I still don't know where this is going, Dr. Meade had said._

I walked home, wanting nothing more than to reconstruct the series of events that preceded that night. He had come home on December 18 on the noon train. He had been tired, feeling terrible. He had said hello to Ella and Wade as they played on the floor underneath the Christmas tree, then had gone straight to bed.

On the 19th, I sent for Dr. Meade, who recommended that he be transferred to the hospital immediately for observation. He was having difficulty breathing. Dr. Meade said many things that I didn't understand, words like severe dehydration, elevated pulse.

I walked into that hospital and explained to the Sister of Mercy that I was his wife, that we had not seen each other in over a month, that I had no idea how long he'd been ill or where he had been, for that matter. I remember that she looked like Careen, a baby faced angel; she asked if I needed a priest. I said no, but thank you.

I woke early the next morning and was greeted by Dr. Meade, who was filled with encouragement that Rhett had made it through the night. But be prepared, Scarlett, he said. Be prepared for the worst.

Ashley walked with me to the hospital after I fed the children their breakfast. _How_? He kept asking.

How does something like this happen? Something about it seemed to defy his understanding. God, the God in whom Ashley trusted, had seen fit to take Melly from him, and now appeared to be on the verge of taking Rhett from me as well.

I looked up at Ashley, the broken, ruined shell of the boy I'd fallen in love with. Only Rhett's shallow, laborious breathing separated our being together. Something in that defied my own understanding. But I managed, as I always do.

Even when Ashley wept, I squeezed his hand reassuringly.

The kind little Sister asked if I'd like to see Rhett. I scarcely recognized him. His fingers and face were swollen, his lips cracked with fever, his hair matted and sweat-soaked.

I kissed his swollen face.

"I love you."

We were married September 17, 1868, in the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta. He was wearing a blue suit, and I a white silk dress. I wouldn't have selected white for a wedding gown if I'd not seen a Harpers' article about some European royal who had done the same.

There was no procession, no music. It was scandalous enough that I was only a year out of mourning for poor dead Frank. Mother and Pa were both dead too. There was no one to hold my arm as I walked towards my smirking groom. I saw Ashley's pale face, looking thoroughly vacant; next to him, Melly was radiant in blue silk. It might have been the same dress she wore to his last birthday party… Suddenly, the enormity of what I was doing hit me, and I began to weep. The justice of the peace actually handed me a handkerchief from his own pocket so that I could wipe the tears from my eyes.

When it was done, he took me to the bridal suite of the National, to wait for the train that would take us to New Orleans. Wade and Ella were at Melly and Ashley's, much to the delight of both Wade and Melly.

"Wasn't that a perfect day, Scarlett?" Melly had said. "I think that you and Captain Butler will be very happy together."

There was a bottle of champagne waiting for us in the suite. I drank most of it and fell asleep crying in Rhett's arms.

During the first week or two after he left, I was walking down the empty corridors of the Peachtree house and shut all the doors. I would avoid looking at any reminders of our marriage, of Bonnie… anything. But I couldn't avoid them by not looking. Rhett is so utterly a part of my life in all its stages. For over a decade, he has been a constant presence- he's been a parent, a husband, a lover, a friend.

Without him I am naked, vulnerable, open. Without him, I am incomplete. I understand how Ashley feels now that Melly is gone.

I understood for the first time what the widows in India who throw themselves on burning pyres are thinking. They are nothing without their lover, just as Ashley is nothing without Melly. He lives, eats, breathes, carries on...but he is not whole. He might as well be with her. I might as well be in that hospital bed with Rhett.

I wanted to scream as I watched him linger in that bed that truly wasn't large enough to hold his tall, broad frame. I wanted him back, and not in the way that I had the day he had left. I no longer wanted to "win" him. I no longer wanted him to love me. I just wanted him to be.

I do believe that was the night that I fell out of love. It was also the night that I learned _how _to love.

And I wept, as I did the night of my wedding - wishing for nothing more than the feel of Rhett's strong arms holding me close.


	6. Leaving Port

6. Rhett

Several years ago, I was walking home from the bank. It was one of those clear, crisp, bright spring days that are far too pleasant to be spent cooped up in one's carriage. But on that day, I had what I believed at that time to be an apparition of death. It was as if time stopped for a second or two - there was quick sunlight, then a shower of falling leaves from a nearby tree. And one in particular landed at my feet. A reminder of, what? My own mortality? The fragility of life? There was no need to remind a middle-aged man with a young wife of his own mortality, still isn't, to this day.

I wanted to run home and make passionate love to Scarlett, to prove my continued virility to myself and to her, to celebrate the life I'd found and the love I'd won.

But I went to Belle's.

And I had to hear from her that my wife had been discovered in an embrace with Ashley Wilkes.

I felt like poor, doomed Charles Hamilton. Only he had the benefit of naivety. I did not. I didn't think about the incident with the leaf again until I was leaving the port of Charleston, taking Bonnie with me on a trip to first, the city of my birth, and second, to New York and London. We made it to New York before she got homesick. But as we left port and I was staring out at the water looking at the city which had turned me out on my ear, I was filled with an innate sense of dread. Had it been a seizure? A fit like my father used to get? A stroke of some kind? Would it happen again? What would Bonnie do without me?

A year after that, I dreamed about death again, although this time, I was the one being left behind by it. I was standing in the middle of an icy ravine, translucent, like shards of broken glass as they are hit by the sunlight. It was a breathtaking vision. And I saw my precious child, dressed all in white atop her fat little pony, waving goodbye to me. I woke and wept like a baby, then, reassured that she was sleeping soundly in her little bed next to mine, I went back to sleep.

Clearly, I had been dreading death all my life. I've always had difficulty accepting anything final. You realize, when you're my age, that time is irrecoverable. That is difficult for those of us who are young at heart, even in an aging body. But I was, and would say still am, unable to accept the fact that Bonnie was dead. It failed to register how something like that could happen to her, my precious, vivacious four-year-old with her whole life in front of her. It would have been far easier if it had been me to begin with.

One morning after it happened, I picked up the newspaper and felt a tightness in my chest that could not be written off as a broken heart, or melancholy, or whatever it is that Meade called it - I was dying. I was going to be with Bonnie.

The next day, I visited Mrs. Wilkes, expecting sympathy. _She_ believed that _she_ was dying. She told me so, repeatedly. She had become pregnant against the advice of all, including her long-suffering husband (whose part in the matter I was gracious enough not to mention), and she was prepared to die for her foolishness. I'm going to lose the baby, she said, I don't know what possessed me to tell you, Captain Butler, but I am convinced that it is my end, and I beg you, I beg you not to bother Scarlett until you absolutely must - she's so brave, so brave - you must not worry her, until we are sure it is so. And so I promised her that I'd do just that, and I was caught in that awful limbo between what was kind to Mrs. Wilkes and what was reasonable. She had been dealing as well through most of the year with a series of enervating medical issues. I could see that her tiny hands and feet were swollen and she was short of breath. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were dull. The steadily increasing frequency in which she sought me out should have given me a clue. She was closing shop and needed my word that Scarlett would be cared for. And I, wallowing in my own grief over losing Bonnie, offered little tenderness back to Melanie as she gripped my hand and told me how much Scarlett loved me.

But during those two months she was with child, clearly buoyed with the pleasures of lovemaking long denied her for medical reasons, her mood seemed to lift to insurmountable heights. She was close to three months in; she'd have another baby and show them all!

We did not speak in any meaningful way during the months between Bonnie's death and her final days.

But she told Scarlett to be kind to me. Her dying words.

The day she died or the day before, I saw Ashley walking Beau to school. You lucky bastard, I thought. Your wife loves you beyond compare, your child is healthy, happy. Why do you need my wife's love too? _I _want Scarlett to love me. Though I grant that my love for the woman has bordered on obsession over the years, I love her as much as any man has ever loved any woman. And she loves Ashley. Always Ashley. If I followed Mrs. Wilkes into the ground, there would be Ashley.

_Always Ashley_.

I tried to dismiss thought from my mind.

And yet he lingers there, even as I profess loudly that I don't give a damn what she does. He lingers like the Reaper carrying his scythe.

October 31, 1873. I'm leaving port again. Or I will be, this time tomorrow. I'm going to Paris, to reconnect with the city I fell in love with as a teenager on the last leg of my Grand Tour. I've not seen it since 1862. I bought her back a bonnet that time. It matched her eyes exactly.

I was sitting at the bar at the National. I had seen Scarlett earlier and made a barbed jest about her looking pale. I'd been to the house twice, and the first time Ashley of all people had answered the door. I'd expected it. Somewhat.

Why had I expected that she would miss me? Perhaps vanity. Perhaps some long-dead desire to know that she cared something. Ha. Better chance of finding snow in the middle of the Sahara.

But Ashley Wilkes did sit down next to me at the bar of the National.

"Drink," I offer.

"No, thank you."

"Take it," I insist, shoving a glass of scotch in his direction.

He drank it down in one swig.

"I must speak to you, Rhett."

"Speak," I say.

"I apologize that I was in your house today."

"I don't want to hear it-"

"I insist that you hear it, Rhett. I have never once spoken directly to you on the subject of Scarlett, so I might as well take this opportunity to do so."

I shrug. "Be my guest."

"Scarlett is desperately in love with you."

I dismissed him with a flippant hand motion.

"Scarlett is wasting away. Your absence is killing her, Rhett, _killing_ her."

I don't care, I want to say. I don't give a damn. Don't give a damn.

"Why can't you accept her love," he said. It did not come off as a question. It was accusatory. So that's how it would be. He wanted me to take her off his hands, expunge his guilty conscience.

"You were right to hate me," he said then. "All those years. You hated me, because of her."

I hate you now. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

"I'm sorry, Rhett. I'm sorry for my part in it."

God damn you, Ashley Wilkes.

And that's all I remember. My ship was sailing. Leaving port for good. I remember them standing above me, watching someone lift me up and convey me to some other loud place where a woman in a long black veil washed my face.

Again, they are standing over me, alternating every hour on the hour. I try to make out their faces, but I cannot. I simply cannot.

But she holds my hand. I know its hers and hers alone.

She whispers. "I love you, Rhett. Even if you no longer love me, no matter what happens, Rhett, darling, I love you."

I always did, I think to myself, I never stopped.


	7. He's A Pirate

7. Ashley

I walked to work. It was a normal winter's day. Normal. Odd that normality keeps coming up. Nothing about it was normal. Melanie was dead, after all, and I was about to spend Christmas Eve with my son and my sister and without my wife. Scarlett too would spend Christmas alone. Rhett, after all, was coming in and out of consciousness, barely clinging to life. But it was still Christmas. And we had Christmas, and life went on, until January, when Rhett came back to us.

Let me try a chronological explanation of the events that led up to that day.

Melly died on September 27, 1873.

Rhett was admitted to Saint Joseph's on December 20, 1873.

Odd, isn't it, that I remember so little of the events that occurred between those two dates, yet they remain in my mind as clear as day? But when Rhett woke for the first time, in late December, he didn't remember a thing. It was still September to him, and Melly was alive and he had never walked out on Scarlett.

I told him that Melly was dead late on the morning of January 5, 1874, at Saint Joe's, after taking over for poor, exhausted Scarlett, who had gone home for an hour or two to rest. Telling him on that day had not been my intention. The physicians had said that he would wake only intermittently and be able to comprehend only limited amounts of information. But the thought crossed my mind at the moment that he woke that if I was the first person he saw, he would wonder where Melanie was. Scarlett and I had discussed our answers at length, and we had mutually decided that she would be with him when he began to wake. And for the first few days, she was.

But she could only be there so many hours at a time. She was already so painfully thin and pale, I could barely stand it. But back to her plan - her aim was to focus on them, their life together. Perhaps, if we were lucky, the questions of Melly and his recollection of their separation would not occur until later, perhaps days later. Then he could know, but only when he was stronger.

I was standing at his bedside when his eyelids fluttered open. "Where's Scarlett," he whispered when he saw me. The whisper was barely audible. I told him that she was at home, that she had not slept in several days and could barely stand when I had sent her home. "Ah," he managed, "Where is Miss Melly, then?"

I told him what had happened. I stressed her ill health, the inevitability of the event. He wept. The man actually wept. I felt like an intruder, although I shared the object of his grief. He dropped back into sleep as quickly as he had woken.

Scarlett came back that evening and he woke again, at almost the same moment she had entered his room. "How is Miss Melly," he whispered again when he saw me. I began again, the miscarriage, her history of illness. The inevitability of the event. "But how is she now?" he whispered again. I told him again.

January 20, 1874, Scarlett took him home to Peachtree Street, although he was too weak to sit or stand unsupported and running a fever that kept Doctor Meade visiting their house at all hours. Scarlett left him only for a moment to see about a skinned knee of one of the children and Rhett attempted to get out of bed and collapsed on the floor. Scarlett had to send Wade out for me to help her lift him back into bed.

On the morning of January 25, he woke up with severe pains in his chest and a steadily rising fever. Meade didn't want to move him this time, and we all maintained a constant vigil at the Peachtree house.

On February 13, he was out of the woods, and I watched him sit up in bed and eat his own eggs. In the weeks that followed, he slowly but surely regained his strength and mobility. Together, he, Scarlett, and I planned a memorial service for Melly at the Episcopal Church.

It took place at six o'clock in the evening on a Friday. After the service, Mrs. Merriwether had arranged a reception at her home. Eventually all of the Old Guard made their way to the party.

We toasted Melly's life.

We had dinner.

And Scarlett stood up in her black dress and put all of the old dragons to shame. Melly would have approved.

On the morning of February 14, she and Rhett were going off to restart their life together by going to Charleston for a few days. I had encouraged her in this - I wanted to see color on her cheeks again.

"Will he be alright, Ashley," she asked me.

"Of course, Scarlett." I reply mechanically. "Look at the man - he's a pirate, isn't he? Indestructible. Besides, tomorrow marks the first day of your new life together."

I meant it.

I imagine him to this day as a pirate, sun-bronzed and self assured, always looking forward to the next voyage. I imagine him at the helm of a mighty ship, Scarlett at his side. I could see them walking across some exotic beach in the warm sunlight.

They left for Charleston first thing in the morning after dropping Wade and Ella at my house for the duration of the winter. That was fine; after all, children entertain themselves, and Beau enjoyed their company.

That was the best morning in weeks. Children, Melly always said, were the givers of life. As I heard their shrieks of laughter coming from Beau's room, I knew at once that she was right. In that moment, I pronounced myself ready to begin the first day of my own new life - instead of terming it _Life Without Melly_, I would call it _Life After Melly_. It was a good day in Atlanta.

I was changing to go downstairs for dinner that evening when India called for me in a frantic voice. Even for dramatic India, that particular tone never bodes well.

It was a telegram from Scarlett. They had made it as far as Savannah. Rhett had passed out on the train. He was resting in her Robillard aunt's house - the prognosis was grim.


	8. Tonight I Think I Die

8. Scarlett

_You're safe_, I told Rhett when the doctor finally left. _I'm here, darling. You're going to be alright._

"When do you have to leave?" he asked me on the day he could finally speak, some days after we'd been in Savannah. His face was tense as he said this - perhaps because it was difficult for him to speak, or perhaps it was a difficult subject. Either way, I answered that I would not leave until we could leave together.

His face seemed to relax at that, and he went back to sleep.

It occurred to me that since he had returned home from St. Joe's, my basic promise to him had been that, that I would not leave. I would take care of him. Hadn't there been something about that in our wedding vows, something about loving, comforting through sickness and health … You would think after being married three times I would pay attention to what I was being asked to promise. It's not in my nature to dwell upon the particulars.

But here I was, promising to take care of the man that had walked out on me not six months before.

Fool that I am, I had it in my mind that he would outlive me. Its true, for all the years between us. I remember discussions of his wealth in his lawyer's office after our marriage - I must admit that the subject of Rhett's money called for my full and complete attention - but I remember being disturbed by the word _predecease_. That wouldn't be Rhett. The man is a cat with at least six or seven more lives to go. He couldn't die and leave me.

_He's left you before, Scarlett_, I think to myself.

Once after Melly died. Once before that, taking Bonnie with him. Once before that, on the pass at Rough and Ready.

"Tonight I think I die, Scarlett," Melly's tiny little voice managed from the back of the wagon. "Please, please." What, let her? Take her out of her misery, what Melly?

"Mrs. Wilkes," Rhett said, "You've been incredibly valiant this night. Don't stop now, I beg you."

Easy for him to say. He didn't hold her hand for twenty-nine excruciating hours. He had no idea what she had been through. How he dare?

_When I'm dead on the alter of my country, I hope your conscience hurts you._

I mentioned to him, after we'd left his lawyer's office, that I didn't like all that talk of death and dying and that he shouldn't tempt fate.

Would you be sorry, he asked.

Oh Rhett, how you do run on, I had replied.

I would have been sorry.

"You're safe, Rhett. I'm right here."

I believe that I was born with an innate sense of control. I controlled my parents from an early age, and Mammy, and my friends of both genders. I never failed to get a man once I'd set my mind on getting him. Well, excepting Rhett and Ashley, of course. But I was born fearful, too. And after the war, I became even more so.

Case in point, January 26, 1866. I married Frank Kennedy.

I married Frank out of fear, didn't I? I was afraid that I'd lose Tara and everything else, so made poor Frank fall in love with me and I put him in the ground in a year.

And then Rhett proposed. Just like that, life as I knew it ended. Life with Rhett, after all, was anything but ordinary.

As I watched him lay there on Aunt Pauline's bed, I thought to myself - this was one of those events. This is one of those 'things' that just happen. I've never in my life felt so entirely helpless.

Ashley wasn't apprehensive in the least when he arrived the following Tuesday. He asked me what had happened. I had no answer for him. The doctor posited that when he had fallen, there had been some bleeding that had occurred inside of him. Bleeding? How? I thought that they had said that he had pneumonia!

I waited. I cried. I prayed.

I admired my Aunt Pauline's violet curtains of heavy damask.

I was twenty again, pulling down heavy velvet portieres from their rods for Mammy to pattern into a new dress. I ventured further into my mind:

I discovered, at sixteen, I was pregnant with my dead husband's child. My life was over, socially. I was never again going to be invited to parties and receive beaux. I wouldn't even have the luxury of receiving sympathetic callers, confined as I was to the house. I remember Pa being embarrassed as I started to grow round. He wouldn't even look me in the eyes. I wasn't pretty Puss anymore. And I could do nothing about it. I had wished that I was dead.

Years later, my friend Mamie Bart cheerfully recounted how she had gotten her own _inconvenience_ taken care of. A deal was struck. She told me who to see to get it taken care of. Rhett's child. Bonnie.

He found out of course, and made good on his threat not to let me out of his sight while I was carrying her. He wasn't like Pa, embarrassed. He was kind. He was tender. He took care of me.

Now I would have to return the favor.

Bonnie would have been five in June.

August 9, 1873. Bonnie at four. The morning she had fallen to her death. Doctor Meade said that she died immediately. Her neck had broken. She felt no pain. I was so angry, so, so angry. How did he know? How could he have known? I should have listened to Melly. I should never have blamed Rhett. But I did, didn't I?

Now I would have to make up for my mistakes.

_Be kind to Captain Butler, he loves you so._

He left me. I couldn't very well dwell on a promise I had no way of keeping. I cannot count the days on which I found myself abruptly blinded by tears. For Melly, for Bonnie, for Rhett…

I nudged him as he was sleeping.

"I love you."

I do love him. And I always will.


	9. Distant Memories

9. Rhett

Sometime in June, after we had left Savannah, I was in the sixth of what would be fifteen weeks of major recovery at home in Atlanta. I must confess that my memory, not only of that attempted trip, but of the past few months was little more than a blur. I could recall some things about St. Joe's in Atlanta, the nun with the long black veil for one, but I could not yet recall for anything being discharged, re-injured at home… For instance, I was told that I spoke for Miss Melly at the Episcopal Church. How peculiar; for I hadn't remembered that she had died. Ashley said that he had had to tell me of her death.

Scarlett was concerned about the memory loss, but Meade said that it was common after a head trauma. He called it "spotty", as in, my disorientation is lessening, but my memories are still spotty.

I tried to reconstruct my memories from the week before Christmas to June, but it is difficult to do so without becoming immensely frustrated. Before the illness is easier, but I recognize the murkiness of those days as well. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not.

I do recall clearly arguing with Ashley at the bar of the National.

_Scarlett is desperately in love with you._

She'd been left alone for about a month. She does hate to be alone, I've figured that much out about her over the years.

_You're killing her, killing her!_

Kill Scarlett? I can't kill her. The Yankees couldn't, poverty couldn't…Not while she had Ashley to live for. Have him, Scarlett, have him!

He had looked away. "You know, I'm sure, that my wife's last words to Scarlett were of you," he said, as if under the impression that the very mention of Mrs. Wilkes's wishes would settle the question.

In actuality, that enraged me: _What is Miss Melly's opinion to me now,_ I wanted to shout, but did not. _What is Melly's dying wish to me? If I wanted Miss Melly's opinion, I would have asked her._

Instead, I said, I need time, Ashley. Surely Scarlett can wait until then.

"Not really," Ashley said. "She needs you. I cannot convey it with more urgency than that, Rhett."

The day I was due for New York was the day I missed the train. I recall being poured champagne, glass after glass, then whiskey - scotch, bourbon, absinthe…Shots, shots, shots. Whores stroking me. Scarlett. Shots, shots. Bonnie. More goddamn shots. I want to forget, forget. Whores. Shots.

"Everything is going to be alright, Mr. Butler," they kept saying while I was in that infernal hospital. "You're going to get better once we lower your fever. Your wife has been here almost the entire time, maybe you didn't notice that."

Maybe I didn't notice that? I was unconscious!

What had made her come, I wondered. The room around me was dark, dead. Surrounded by specters in long black veils.

_Your disorientation is lessening, Rhett, but I anticipate that your memory will still be spotty. _And this was being presented as progress? Who was he to make such a determination? I needed to remember the events of my own life, didn't I? I couldn't carry on with the blank spots, especially when they represented all the pain. Hell, I was like a small infant. That was my scope of time. When Scarlett left the room for fifteen minutes, it would seem like days until her return. Even after I reassured myself that it was not the case, I found myself closing my eyes while she was out of the room. I had grown used to her presence - I didn't have to see her to know that she was there or not.

I wanted her there. Just in case…

I had asked.

I do not recall getting an answer from Meade. It was a period where I did not get many of my questions answered. What answers I did get tended to be unsatisfactory, as in "We'll just have to wait and see."

_Less risk of pneumonia. _

They kept mentioning that last point to Scarlett sometime before I regained consciousness for good. Pneumonia, hell. My windpipe already felt so swollen and sore, it was like to burst. I'd never so much as had a bad cold, but if this wasn't pneumonia, I'd be dead if I ever had the real thing. I was sick, sick.

Scarlett shook her head again.

"I want him home."

_As time goes by, no memory at all. _

Scarlett resisted that statement, too. This one was Meade's. I looked out the printed blue cotton curtains that framed the window, as though the sunset was the last I'd ever see. That was demented, of course, but so was I.

The children filed in to see me on a Friday morning. They stood at the foot of the bed and tried to explain what had happened. I heard a noise, I called out for you, you fell. Wade's version was slightly different from Ella's. His ended with, now you have pneumonia. The children came and went. Scarlett was still there. She was squeezing my hand, pleading in a low mournful voice.

_I love you._

It was June. My memories were still distant, spotty. Scarlett and I sat out in the sun. I listened to her talk. She asked how I was feeling. Over and over again.

Helpless.

A distant memory that involved neither Scarlett nor Bonnie. I had been alone in the kitchen of the house, feeding my big, fluffy St. Bernard. My father entered.

You will marry the girl.

No.

You _will_.

I will _not_.

The next morning.

Get out. Go to hell for all I care. You are no longer my son.

_Not my son. _

Had he not turned me on my ear, would I have gone to California? Would I have returned to Georgia in 1861? Would I have met Scarlett? Had I not, Bonnie wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't be sitting here, helpless.

Would I need to relive every mistake, every bad memory? How many nights Scarlett and I had not shared a bed, or how many times one or the other of us had said the wrong thing? Or stopped speaking? Or imagined that the other had stopped speaking?

_Let it go. You don't have to have the last word. You're not your father. You don't always have to be right. You're not your father's son._

"Scarlett. Thank you. For everything."

She nodded, giving my hand a small squeeze.

It was as close to a declaration of love as I was capable of making in my present condition.

The decision was left to me. And the choice I had made carried the potential for abandonment, even betrayal. But I had to make it. I did make it, in that moment.

I chose Scarlett.


	10. To Love Again

10. Ashley

If I kept a diary or other memoir, an entry might have read something like this: Getting sideswiped by looking back.

In July, I returned with Beau to Twelve Oaks and moved into the overseer's house, the only building still intact. I saw immediately that being in the County brought with it the potential of triggering all that I had sought to put behind me.

I could control it, I thought, by avoiding any venue that I might associate with either Scarlett or Melly. This would require, of course, ingenuity.

I had lived in the County from 1836 until 1861. When I returned in 1865, we spent a significant amount of time there, this time at Tara, until Scarlett married Frank and convinced - well, coerced - me to become a partner in her lumber business. The same year that the house in which I had taken residence was built, I was born in the big house. I went to school here, experienced my first kiss under the rosebushes before Melanie had ever grown up enough for me to court and when Scarlett was still making mudpies with the Tarleton twins instead of tempting them. But for reasons that remain unclear to me, being home at Twelve Oakes rarely triggered the onslaught of memories that being in Atlanta did, although in theory, every acre of land was permeated with associations I tried desperately to avoid: the war, the end of life as I knew it.

After Rhett's illness had run its course, he needed to heal physically and Scarlett needed to heal emotionally. I, for my part, needed to extricate myself from the situation in order for them to do either. So Beau and I would stay in the overseer's house, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks at a time. We set up a small garden, we talked.

_What if_, Beau was always asking. What if Mother was alive? What if Grandpa was still alive? Uncle Charlie? Ella's Pa?

He could ask _what if_ about anything.

What if everything changed?

It had, had it not? The war had changed us. All of us.

And yet, Twelve Oaks in all its ruin seemed the safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, where no one would know about or refer to the events of the last year. The ignominy of the scandal with Scarlett, Melly's ill-advised pregnancy, the miscarriage, her death. This was the place in which I could still be the man I had been before any of it had happened.

I plotted my garden. I remained guarded, even around my neighbors.

Never once the entire summer did I set foot on Tara. When forced to ride by the turn, I looked neither left nor right. I could avoid looking at the red soil, remembering the agony of splitting rails, of watching Scarlett throw herself at me, of dreaming about her at night while sweet Melly lay next to me, chaste as a nun.

I invited Honey and her husband from Lovejoy to dinner every night they had business in Jonesboro, which was frequent. I went to the Tarletons' to pay court to Beatrice and the three unmarried girls. There were horses and roses just as there had been all those years before. All that was missing were four boisterous male voices.

In their place were four marble headstones.

Ah, what if?

I could have been in a bank in New York.

Yet, I was home, toiling in the garden. Just like my father had done after my mother died.

One afternoon, I was riding several miles east of my property, previously untested territory, as it straddles the border of Tara. I caught sight, unprepared, of a tree clearing in which Scarlett and I rode through only days before I was to announce my engagement to Melanie. I wanted to tell her then. I would have, too, if it hadn't been so dark. Perhaps, then, things would have been different for us all.

What if?

Melly the day of the barbeque. The cherry-colored organdie sash. The scarf I wrapped theatrically around her small shoulders, my subtle, vague way of expressing my feelings for her. I should have shouted them.

My furlough. She was wearing her nightgown low about her slender shoulders. Her attempt at seduction. She should have known better. I was smitten the moment she opened her mouth. She could have been a troll.

What if?

Beau and I walked around the property together, as my own father had done with me at his age. I listened as he chattered, then put my arm around them as we sat on the hill and watched the sun set. I nudged him as he began to fall asleep.

I need to fall in love again.

What if? What if?

In point of fact the house which would have once been my symbol of status no longer existed. It had been burned to the ground by the Yankee army and there was no hope of rebuilding it in my current financial state. In fact, nothing of it remained standing but one chimney.

Scarlett and Rhett arrived in the middle of August.

The day, when it came, seemed to unfold like a dream. Rhett was thin. So thin. He looked old. Scarlett, too. She was aging. At twenty-nine, she looked thirty-five, if not more.

What if?

What if I had been the one to marry her? Would she have looked any younger? Would she have been any happier than she was now, clinging onto Rhett's arm as though he would fall over dead at any moment?

No, I tell myself to this day. You would have driven her into madness.

Back in the clearing, alone with Scarlett for the first time, I took the loaf of bread and tore it into pieces so we could share like we did as children. After a few bites she shook her head. She had not kept any solid food down for days now and could not eat more. She said that there had been several days she could not eat at all.

"Do you think we've made it, Ashley?" she asked then.

"Of course," I reassured her.

I remember telling her something similar some weeks before.

I realized that I had answered my own _what if_. There had been no error. I had known from the beginning.

I left the conversation where it was.

There was no need to fall in love again.


	11. One Day More

11. Scarlett

One day it seemed important that I read my mother's memoirs, her personal accounts of day to day life at Tara. They'd been stuffed into a massive trunk of her belongings and those of Pa, cast into the oblivion of the attic by a zealous Suellen during a cleaning frenzy. I had known that these papers had existed; I had most likely been the one who had ordered Mammy to put them away. Mother, to me, was about as accessible as the Blessed Virgin, and as holy. I don't know why I made that comparison, for obviously she had to have sinned somewhere along the line. Perfection could never have yielded Suellen and myself. Careen, perhaps, could qualify…

I did reread her memoirs. What happened to her is this, I'll summarize: Phillipe Robillard, her daring young cousin, has been condemned by the State of Louisiana to die. Her father has interceded, gaining a promise from the young man that he will accept deportation and return to France immediately. Phillipe approaches Mother and his family in vain, begging for her hand in marriage. Her father refuses. He dies, of course, in a barroom brawl, not a week later. He was twenty-seven years old. After a good deal of wailing, Mother decides to forever distance herself Grandfather Robillard and anyone else who had had a hand in her misery. No one steps in to save her. She dies, at length, at the hands of my sweet, darling Pa. She acquiesces to his every whim, just as she has been taught, and he behaves in every way badly. He bellows and gets drunk and shouts and clumsily fulfills his husbandly duties. She remains remote, other. She brings children into the world, six total. She does not offer a word in her own defense, nor in self-pity. She views her situation as some kind of errant Purgatory, a temporary state of corporal punishment by which she will ultimately prove worthy of her lost love.

If I wasn't Gerald O'Hara's daughter, the memoir ends happily.

This was not my memory of Mother, which suggested that I was already given, from the earliest stages of childhood, to gifting those whom I either admired or did not understand with superhuman qualities. The principle divergences between the pages and my memory appear toward the end when Mother is sick and realizes that she is actually going to die. She does not speak about me, Suellen, or Careen … or even Pa. Pa, for his part, seems to have pressed her, at which point, to his distress, since what she turns out to have on her mind are those lingering feelings for Phillipe, she does speak. I don't need to read further to know what happened. Pa, alarmed, shuts off the prospect of hearing more by drinking himself into a stupor. Mother has the best of it. She's back with her beloved, again young Ellen Robillard, the belle of Savannah.

But the ending (which has somehow taken on the double meaning of "my" ending, as well) could not be construed as happy.

In some ways, it was better that she died. It "worked out" for her, so to speak. If she had survived the war, for instance, she would have had to endure the hell and agony of poverty and defeat. I would have had to face her. Could I have faced her? I was devastated when she died, but do I believe that I could have faced her today, if she had lived? I don't.

Pa.

Pa looked back and saw omens, messages from Mother that he had missed. He remembered her earbobs, the bandage with which she wrapped his knee so tenderly. He lived by the symbols. The voice in his head was Mother's, and if he had stopped listening, it would have been the most grievous betrayal.

_I tell you that I shall not live for two whole years in Clayton County. Not so long as I am perpetually with child. A babe at fifteen and another at sixteen. I tell you that I shall not live through it. _

Later that summer I was again reminded of Mother. The curtainless windows cried out for dressing. Will wouldn't hear of taking a penny for them and Suellen blamed me for the loss of the portieres. Yes, I want to say, the portieres are gone, but you have a roof over your head.

I walked through the halls of Tara. I found the house darker than I had remembered it. I reread Mother's memoirs, this time finding them a sunnier version of my own life. If I just exchanged the names, it could have been me in her stead, Ashley, Phillipe, and Pa would have been Rhett.

When I shared with Rhett my thoughts, he laughed at me before telling me that I did not sufficiently appreciate the irony.

Something else had happened toward the end of the summer, and Ashley was the first to draw it to my attention.

In August there was a memorial service for the County boys who had perished in the war (this was not the "something else" that happened). The service was on the Tarleton's lawn at Fairhill.

_I met Mr. O'Hara at Fairhill, coming directly from dear Charles's memorial at Twelve Oaks. Scarlett accompanied me, and as we sat there under the hot August sun, death was very much on my mind. Not my own death, of course, nor even the deaths of the young gentlemen who so valiantly sacrificed themselves for our Cause, but for the death of P. Beloved. I looked down at my daughter on my left, sick with the nausea of a first pregnancy. Stuck in a false mourning for a young man for whom she had no feeling. A moment of terror overwhelmed me as I realized the inevitable outcome of her life, the eternal darkness that will plague her. And I realized that I had done nothing to prevent it. What wouldn't I do to have prevented it? The service ended at three in the afternoon and Pork brought the carriage round to convey us home. As we drove away, Scarlett said, "Mother, I'm frightened." _

_There had not been an appropriate moment to address the impending event which was becoming more and more obvious day by day. "Whatever are you frightened of, dearest?" What wouldn't she be frightened of? _

"_Everything," she whimpered._

"_It will be alright, dearest," I said. _

_When we had reached home, I sent Scarlett to bed. When I reflected further about her future, I began to cry. On that occasion, I realized that her fate would be more unhappy than even my own. _

Mother's words haunted me. Was that what she experienced as she herself gave birth to my sisters and I? Did we represent the eternal darkness that plagued her until death took her away from us?

How could she have experienced that sort of dull apathy? She was perfection. She loved us. Better than I loved my own children, that much was certain. But it occurs to me as I write this that Mother presented a far more unattainable standard of motherhood than anyone else would ever hope to achieve, even under the best of circumstances. I had none of her advantages, and I make no apologies for not pampering my children. They saw me for what I was, I will say that much in my defense…they will not have to decipher my real thoughts after my death.

Even still, I promised to love them more.

The "something else" that happened toward the end of that summer of 1874 was the series of events that followed the memorial service at Fairhill and the appointment with Doctor Meade back in Atlanta. A week or so later, and my suspicion was confirmed. Or my prayers had been answered - however one wants to look at it. "It is regrettable, Scarlett. I would have preferred for you to have not…" Meade later said to me. The results after two more weeks (it was by then September, still raging hot out) confirmed that it was safe to share the news with Rhett. Another two weeks went by before I was able to do it. As I saw it, the timing had been providential. Nearly a year after sweet Melly had been taken from us, I had been given another chance at motherhood. Not that I was aiming for perfection this time around, but it never hurts to be optimistic. Rhett and I took very different views on this point. He saw it as a potential death sentence, one of his own making. You no more know how you're going to die than I do or anyone else does, I recall saying.

"Its all my fault." Rhett said, then left me standing there in the darkness, wondering if it was eternal, wishing that I had one day more to talk to Mother in person.


	12. Burning the Past

12. Rhett

There came a time in the summer when I began to feel fragile, unstable. For instance, I would trip over something inconsequential and I would run a few steps to avoid falling. What if I didn't? What if I fell? What would break? Who would see the blood streaming down my legs? Who would be with me?

I started leaving lights on throughout the night. If the house was too dark I could not get up to look for a book or make certain that we were safe, Scarlett, the children and I. Will and Suellen and their three girls were there too, but I never seemed to think to hard on them. If the house was too dark, I would lie there immobilized, entertaining visions of peril. My dreams provided no solace, no refuge from the agony of the past wielded into that of the future.

I thought about this later.

I realized that I was not presenting a coherent face to the world. I had to burn the past, had to, had to. Beginning with the dreams.

Scarlett used to tell me her dreams, not because she needed my help in understanding them, but because she wanted to rid herself of them, clear her mind for the day. "Don't tell me you're still running through the fog," I would say to her when she'd wake me up in the middle of the night, but in the end I would listen.

She told me that after Miss Melly died, she stopped having dreams.

In the late summer she began to dream again, for the first time since it happened. Since I can no longer pass them off on Ashley I find myself thinking about them. I remember telling her that I had dreams about dying and getting old…the obvious fact, that everyone knows except for me. Remote to the end, keeping secrets from myself. My body damn near mutinied this past winter, and I just barely managed to regain control of my vessel, ah, another sailing metaphor. I realized that that Scarlett's situation is my own. She too was faced with her own mortality, first when she fell, second with Bonnie, third with Miss Melly. And again with me, I am sure.

In one dream she was hanging Bonnie's blue velvet riding habit in her closet only to find that it was in shreds. She showed it to me. I say (or she says, who knows in dreams) that this was her favorite. She's determined to find her an identical blue velvet riding habit before she wakes up from her nap. In other words, she must fix what she broke, _bring her back_. The similarity of this dream to one of my own does not escape my attention. Nor does the fact that I am still thinking _she's dead because of me, I did it, I am responsible_.

In another dream of mine, she and I are sailing on the Ashley River. There are many other boats, and we have assembled as a group. Others are boarding their respective vessels but there is no sign of Scarlett. I decide that I should leave the boat to search for her. While I'm waiting on the shore, I realize that the other boats are leaving, one by one. Finally, there is no one left onshore but me. My first thought is anger: she has left me. _As I left her._ There is a sense, even outside of my dreams, however irrational, of being abandoned. Shouldn't that be her sentiment? Shouldn't she hold me responsible for her ordeal? Did she feel anger at me, for instance, for leaving her? The answer would have to do with the way in which anger creates guilt and vice versa.

I do not disbelieve this answer, but it remains less suggestive to me than the mystery of me being left alone on the Ashley River.

I know how it feels. The point is that Scarlett does not.

When the twilights were long at Tara, we would eat in the front parlor, where the light was. By the time September came I was in fact working, or trying to work, but I also wanted not to be out, exposed.

At a point in the summer it occurred to me that I had been sharing a bed with Scarlett for a little over a month and there had been no mention of Ashley, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart from him in our married life, so to be about five miles away from him and not to have heard his name was a truly remarkable feat. There had been the week or two or three here and there in the early days of our marriage, when I longed to please her, a new experience for her in a marriage. There had been a month while we were on our honeymoon in New Orleans. There had been a few weeks after Bonnie was born. On all such occasions we had spoken to one another with such tenderness, such, dare I say it, love.

I remember having had on that particular eve in Clayton County a sense of well-being so profound that I did not want to go to sleep. I found candles and lit them and kissed her and settled against her in the bed, used to the feel of her body against me by now. She had been reading some letters of her mothers and had fallen asleep. Wade and Ella had gone downstairs, I could hear their conspiring laughter. I could see Scarlett sleeping.

I sat on the balcony overlooking the sacred soil of Tara and finished a bottle of wine we had drunk with dinner and watched the trees sway in the wind.

I was going to climb back into bed without disturbing her, a complicated sequence.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Getting in bed." I reply.

"I have a present for you." Scarlett says, grabbing my hand, then moving it to her midsection and letting it rest there. "That's my birthday present to you."

I remember tears coming to my eyes. I feel them, even now.

The birthday present no one else could give me.


	13. It Is Well

**Note: Wishing one and all a joyous holiday week. I continue to be _thankful_ for those who have read and reviewed my stories! Blessings, Eugenie**

* * *

><p>13. Ashley<p>

I have difficulty thinking of myself as a widower. I remember hesitating the first time I had to answer the question, when Beau returned to school in Atlanta and his new teacher, a gentleman from New Jersey, inquired as to the whereabouts of _Mrs. _Wilkes. Oddly enough, I also had trouble thinking of myself as a husband. Given the value I have always placed upon the rituals of domesticity, the concept of "husband" should not have been a difficult one for me to grasp, and yet, it was. For a long time after Melly and I were married, for instance, there was always trouble with one or the other of our rings. Mine became too tight for my ring finger after the war, so for a long time, I wore it on my fifth finger. Immediately after Melly died, I put the ring in a small box of her personal effects.

This seemed to work.

It seems that others wear the rings in a similar way. For instance, I've yet to see Rhett wear his once.

I realized that I made a conscious effort to wear my wedding ring in public. When the Tarleton misses would come round for tea or when poor Dimity Munroe would ask of Beau, a thinly veiled attempt to inquire as to my availability, I heard myself urgently reply that I could not possibly consider seeing another woman socially. I was in no shape to court a woman. It was as if I had finally learned how to stand on my own, and I was fighting to maintain balance, avert the inevitable fall.

I realized for the time being I could not be trusted to present a coherent face to the world.

Some days later I was stacking some of the books I had brought with me from Atlanta that were just lying around the house. Stacking books seemed at that point the limit of what I could do by way of organizing my life. Careful not to push the limit too far, I opened one of the copies of _Great Expectations_. Melly's favorite. The story is told from the first-person view of the orphan, Pip. One of the several levels on which the story disturbed me was this: The novel's end comes replete with all but fireworks and orchestra music. Pip returns to Satis House to find that it has been torn down, but on the horizon he sees a figure that looks a lot like Estella, his long-lost love. Out of the rubble of the decayed mansion which at one point represented to Pip all that he could never, ever have, comes new love. It's a very phoenix-like moment. In the marsh mists that are rising around them, Pip says, "I saw no shadow of another parting from her", and the reader is led to believe that Pip and Estella live happily ever after. However, this final sentence is a bit strange in its emphasis of the word _shadow_, for even though Pip tells us that there were no more shadows, the word is weighty and I can't help but see a shadow in the back of my mind.

Melly disagreed with me on that point.

I suppose that I have never been able to wrap my mind around that which is clear-cut and easily understood by others. Scarlett and Rhett and even Melly were able to adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in a very short amounts of time. For me, there are events to which I am slow or unable to adapt completely. Displacement was one such event. Death was another. Of the Old South, of Melly, whatever ultimate finality was being leveled in my direction.

I see Doctor Meade in October after we returned to the city, a routine follow-up. He asks how I am. This should not have been, in my physician and friend's clinic, an unforeseeable question. I find myself in sudden tears. He _is_ my friend. He was Melly's friend. His son Darcy was killed before my eyes at Gettysburg. He was with Melanie when she took her last breath. In the first days after she had died, he had come by the house. When Rhett had gotten sick in Savannah, he had gone up with me on a Sunday afternoon and talked to the doctors at the hospital there and then explained it all to Scarlett and I. He had been very kind, helpful, and encouraging. A true friend.

"I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation.

"Melly would have found one," he said softly, scratching at his tuft of grey hair.

I agreed, despite not wanting to believe it.

But as I left, I realized that my impression of myself had never been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I found it difficult to locate the silver lining. It occurred to me that perhaps that was the way of my generation, the defeated Southerners who had lost everything in the war - but then I reverted to a different sort of logic altogether - my generation would be remembered for the Rhett's and Scarlett's amongst us, those who rose from the ashes rather than allowing themselves to be buried within them.

I had been remarkably lucky all of my life. The point, as I saw it, was that I had no right to think of myself as unlucky now.

_I saw no shadow of another parting. _

All was well.


	14. Take Her To Sea

14. Scarlett

"You wanted a different kind of wife," I said to Rhett as we walked back to Peachtree Street after dinner at the National - it was the initial volley in those fights we would start in the months after his recovery.

They never lasted all that long.

"You should have married someone more like Melly."

"If I wanted to marry someone like Miss Melly I would have married someone like Miss Melly," Rhett would say, at first patiently, then less so.

I am writing now as the end of the first year approaches.

The Atlanta sky is dark when I go to bed at seven in the evening. The child grows stronger, bigger than my others. A boy, Mammy predicts, a strong healthy boy for Rhett.

My sign from Melly. And from Mother. A profession of faith in the future. I do not feel this faith in the future just yet, with all the uncertainties of this year after - but I invent them, when I can. I notice that I have lost the skills for ordinary social encounters, however undeveloped those skills might have been, that I had a year ago.

I can only answer to who I am now. I am what I am. I am Scarlett O'Hara Butler. I am guilty of various and sundry sins, several of which I believe are unpardonable. I have been disappointed in love. I have suffered much.

Those facts are neither ambiguous nor open to interpretation. From my mother I inherited my looks and my proclivity toward chronic disappointment. From my father I inherited an unbridled optimism which has somehow never left me, even in those hours which seemed dominated by darkness.

I was born in Clayton County, moved seventeen years later to Atlanta and remained there, with intermittent returns home. My home is my home because my father won the house and land in a poker game and happened to marry my broken-hearted, blue-blooded mother. At least, that was what we were told. Anyway, he bought it or won it or maybe someone willed it to him, I'm not sure which and it certainly doesn't matter to me, not now. When I was sixteen, the war came and my way of life came and went along with it. I had four children, two who survived, one who died early and one who was not born at all, a victim of its own parents' foolishness. I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I have told you how it was, up until a year ago.

What I had in Melanie Wilkes was someone who can and will never be replaced. And I pretended to be her friend for twelve years. I say "pretend" because it was ofttimes false on my part; but never hers. As it happened, the man who I had always counted on came nowhere near fulfilling my expectations. Money ran out and my parents died and everyone leaned on me. So I did what I had to do. I did what Melly could have never done, for all her inner strength of character and heart.

"You were always twenty years before your time," Rhett observed to me one night, one where we stayed at the National for no good reason but to get out of the house. "The Frank Kennedy scheme, the store, the mills, and what do you see today? An independent woman who makes all of her own decisions. You could be an Andrew Carnegie in Atlanta today."

"That girl doesn't exist anymore," I said. "That girl is no longer me."

"I'm speaking about then, Scarlett. As it was."

Then Rhett called for a shot of Jameson, a brand of Irish whiskey I had never known anyone but my Pa to order, then he raised his glass the great Gerald O'Hara. I gave him my poker chips to play for me and went to the ladies' room and remained there. I passed a window and found myself swimming in the color blue: I mean, the light that swept in through the window was blue. As blue as the eyes that Bonnie had shared with Pa. After a few minutes it seemed to deepen to the color of her blue velvet riding habit, the one she'd been wearing the day that she fell. Then, out of nowhere, it faded. And I stood in the lavatory looking at my reflection in the mirror: that of a stranger. She stared back at me, impassive. Full cheeks like apples and clear, bright eyes. Hair that glowed with the health and radiance of a steady diet. Full breasts barely hidden under a Chantilly lace shawl. A swelling belly, noticeable only to those who looked for it. A husband, one who loved me unconditionally and for myself.

The next day, Rhett and I were walking with Wade and Ella around the lake in the middle of the park when we decided to cut across to Oakwood. We visited Bonnie and Melly, and then Charles and Frank. The next night, Ella wanted to go again, if only to repeat the interesting adventure.

Rhett took her without Wade and I. We rested on the bench at the entrance. Dolly Merriwether's eyes ogling my boy and I. "I declare, Wade Hampton, if you aren't the very picture of Charles Hamilton," the old buffalo cried. "Scarlett, dear, I've been meaning to call on you since you've returned to Atlanta. How is Captain Butler's health?"

I must have answered her, and Rhett must have finished the tour. We were walking back to the house and Wade was telling him what a strange thing had occurred.

"As if she would really call," I said.

Rhett shrugged. "Perhaps you should let her. Let her know who you really are."

Later that night, I was brushing Ella's hair. She really was a pretty child. She had a lot of Frank in her, and a lot of Mother. But mostly me. Same with Wade. The picture of Charles Hamilton. But they were mine; a part of me.

I finished the year by letting them know who I was.

And the Atlanta Old Guard appeared. At the time it seemed unexpected. A week later, we were on our way to Charleston to see Rhett's mother. I had to turn down Wade and Ella's invitations to parties.

We sailed down the Ashley River - Wade, Ella, Rhett, and me. I commented haphazardly, thinking about the happenings of the year before: "We're here on this sailboat in lieu of filing for divorce."

Rhett laughed. "A far better alternative, my dear."

"Indeed," I replied. "Take us to sea, Captain Butler."


	15. Another Year  Begins

15. Rhett

I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account, and similarly, I do not want to finish the year. Well, too late, Butler. 1874 is done and 1875 has begun.

I look for a resolution to my account and I find none. The days pass and January becomes February. Before I know it, summer will be upon us. Certain events will come to pass. Wade will be ready for a preparatory academy, away from his mother and home. My image of him as a boy will be forever shattered.

He'll be a young man and I must treat him as such. My Bonnie's death will be even more remote, her image less immediate. Miss Melly's death will be less raw. It has already taken on the sense of happening _in another year_.

All of last year, I kept time based upon Miss Melly's death, then my illness. I realized today for the first time, that my memory must now be based upon something else. Something that involves something besides our own losses, our hurts, our aging bodies. This day one year ago was February 27, 1874. Miss Melly did not see this day. Nor did Bonnie.

Today. February 27, 1875. I have a drink with Ashley Wilkes. I recall that once he seemed the very epicenter of my married life, knowing that Scarlett preferred him over me and knowing that I was powerless to do anything about it. I think about that night of the Shantytown raid. Frank Kennedy was dead and Ashley was hurt. I didn't have to take him to Belle's. I was under no obligation to save him. But I did.

I let it go. We have our brandy.

I walk into Bonnie's room, sit down on her tiny bed. After several long moments, I stand up. I leave the door open. And I walk down the hall, hearing Mammy's exalting cries.

Ashley is grinning down at me.

Then, Mammy puts a small, swaddled bundle into my arms. I barely have time to examine the dark hair on the crown of its perfectly shaped head before another is placed in my other arm. This one too, has the same black hair, the same blue eyes.

"A boy and a girl-chile, Mist' Rhett!" Mammy says.

"And Scarlett?" I ask.

"Jes' fine. Miss Scarlett's jes' fine."

Somehow, someway, it had all worked.

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><p><strong>Note: Dear All - With this chapter, "The Year After" is now complete! Thanks so much for reading, reviewing, and submitting constructive criticism. This has been really fun and therapeutic for me to write and get my mind off of the demands of "real life". I hope that now that you've read it, you'll let me know how I did. And if you're really brave, check out my other story "It's Complicated", which puts a modern spin on the end of our favorite novel. Until next time, EV<strong>


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